This year's annual Caribbean Christmas Escape is to the island of St. Martin (containing the Dutch "constituent country" of Sint Maarten and the French "overseas collectivity" of Saint Martin).
Our southbound flight was this morning just before 9 AM (originally scheduled for 8:10 AM) from Philly, so we gathered at the Marriott airport hotel last night to avoid having to wake up around 4 AM and fight traffic.
After getting something to eat, we retreated upstairs to divvy up snack bags for the trip.
We returned some items to one of the cars, and collectively took the opportunity to coach Lauren on how to park (while also moving the car closer).
This morning, we had a lovely view of the Philadelphia Airport before sunrise, as we met at 7 AM to walk across the pedestrian bridge to the terminal.
There was a bit of winter weather, but we weren't significantly delayed, arriving around 2 PM local (it's 1 hour ahead of EST). After enduring a fairly painless, if slow, customs and immigration process, we found the rental shuttle over to Europcar where the adventure began.
Despite having reserved (and prepaid) a van on August 15th, the SXM Europcar did not a van for us. After much patient negotiating and a litany of excuses, the best we could come up with was getting a shuttle to another car rental place (Sax) that had a van for us. It was not at the same price as our 130-days-ago reservation, so I can't wait to fight them on that.
Having watched many people not get their reserved cars every time we've been to the Caribbean, it was only a matter of time before our luck ran out. Given that it's the busiest tourist season of the year, I'm thankful we were able to get a suitable replacement. Also, it's the first rental car we've had that came with cold beer for everyone.
It was about 4 o'clock by the time we finally got transportation. The traffic around the airport was ridiculous, with Google Maps estimating that we'd need 50 minutes to drive the not-quite-5-mile trip to our Airbnb, so we drove in the complete opposite direction in search of a view and something to eat.
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